Philip of Spain

by Henry Kamen

  The rest of the year was spent alternating between Madrid and Aranjuez. He spent the Christmas of 1551 at Toro. The day after New Year he wrote to Maximilian: ‘I came here for the holidays and after them I shall return to Madrid. Before that, my sister will be married.’7 His youngest sister, sixteen years old and strikingly attractive, was due to marry prince João of Portugal. About to lose her as well, Philip made sure he could spend the maximum amount of time in her company. ‘At Easter I'm going to Toro,’ he wrote in April.8 At this juncture international events broke into his domestic preoccupations. The situation abroad was rapidly deteriorating.

  Distracted by his ill-health, too confident over his victory in Germany and the secure succession agreed at Augsburg, the emperor was caught unawares by his enemies. In August 1551 the Turks captured Tripoli and prepared to move in the Mediterranean. In October the French forged an alliance with the German Protestants. In 1552 the whole scenario exploded.9 Maurice of Saxony, on whose friendship Charles had depended heavily, joined the other Protestant princes and came to an agreement with Charles's principal enemy, France. Henry II of France immediately laid claim to the Habsburg lands in Italy. He also sent an army into Lorraine while the German princes massed another army in Franconia. The emperor was at Innsbruck, without sufficient forces. His brother Ferdinand would not or could not help him. Virtually alone, in late May 1552 Charles was forced to flee for safety over the Brenner pass, in the midst of a raging snowstorm.

  Philip tried to prepare the treasury for the crisis. A Cortes had been summoned to meet in October 1551. It did not give substantial help, so another session was called for the end of the year. When news from Germany reached Spain there was indignation; the news of his father's humiliation angered Philip. Those who remembered Maurice as a friend were the most indignant. ‘What Maurice did was an act of great villainy,’ Ruy Gómez protested.10 Several Castilian nobles, among them Alba, set off at once to help the emperor and Philip intended to follow their example. In June he wrote to Andrea Doria (who was ferrying Alba to Italy): ‘I have decided to go to serve His Majesty, and to this effect I am writing the present letter to implore you. When you arrive in Genoa you will do me a very great favour by coming back at once with the galleys, without losing a moment, so that I can cross over.’11 In the event, no doubt dissuaded by his father, he stayed behind and dedicated himself to raising men and money. Letters were sent throughout Spain to raise volunteer soldiers and cash; the Church was tapped for money.

  No sooner was all this set on foot than the prince convoked the joint Cortes of Aragon for July 1552 at Monzón. Madrid was his base in the first half of 1552. During these months he and Ruy Gómez put into effect in Castile an overhaul of the government and a purge of institutions. The measures (as we shall see, in Chapter Four) brought about the first clashes between Gómez and the duke of Alba. Philip took a break at Easter, which he spent with his sister at Toro, with courtesy stops at Tordesillas to see his grandmother. In mid-June he took leave of Juana, who set out towards Portugal for her marriage to prince João. Philip went in the opposite direction, arriving at Monzón on 30 June.

  He braved heat and discomfort to assist at the Cortes. With good reason, he never had favourable memories of his stays at Monzón. This time he remained there a full six months, giving him an opportunity to play a closer role in the affairs of the crown of Aragon. Catalans, Valencians and Aragonese used the occasion to direct their petitions to him. The opening speech was made on 5 July. Subsequent discussions, as often happened, dragged on. To escape from the boredom of the setting, the prince spent his leisure hours hunting and work was left to the end of the day. Secretary Zayas wrote to Gonzalo Pérez from Monzón in November: ‘His Highness returned from hunting at about ten, supped at once, and afterwards he and the duke of Máqueda read your letter and were a great while discussing the matter … It is now past midnight.’12 Sometimes the prince returned too late for work. A secretary apologised to Pérez for not replying to a letter sooner: ‘because His Highness the day before yesterday spent all day hunting, until late at night’.13 The Cortes did not close formally until 27 December. Philip stayed to spend Christmas at Monzón, then took his leave and headed for Saragossa. He spent an enjoyable New Year's Day in the Aragonese capital, then returned with the court to Madrid in mid-January 1553.

  From October 1552 the emperor had been besieging the city of Metz, then in French hands with a large Imperial army commanded by Alba. But Charles was forced to raise the siege at the beginning of January 1553. It was a humiliating withdrawal, and the emperor's last military action. He felt old, ill and depressed. For some time, he had considered the possibility of abdication. In the autumn of 1552, before the siege of Metz began, he had been opposed to the idea of Philip coming to Germany with reinforcements. Now things looked different. In Brussels, to which he withdrew after Metz, the emperor consulted with Mary of Hungary. She had wanted Philip to come the previous year; now she persuaded Charles to agree that only the prince's presence would give some dignity to the emperor's straits. A letter was accordingly sent in late March from Brussels. The main business, Charles told Philip, was the latter's impending marriage with princess Maria of Portugal. But Philip must also come again to the Netherlands. ‘I have represented to you many times how you need to win the confidence and affection of these states, giving them through your presence and contact more satisfaction than they had in your last stay here, since they were not able to get to know you as well enough as was required to keep them happy and gain their goodwill.’ Besides, something must be done about the insupportable cost of the wars. He had tried not to touch the wealth of America, which he wished to reserve for Philip, ‘so that after my death you may have a source of supply, should some necessity arise when I am not here.’ They must discuss this, and also the threat from France. The prince must come north. ‘I very much doubt whether these states, of whose importance you are aware, can be sustained without your presence and aid.’ Then, after settling these issues and the abdication, ‘together we can return to Spain and conclude those matters which I had left aside for until then’.14

  The letter crossed with one from Valladolid in which Philip expressed his deep regrets at his father's situation. He was doing his best, he wrote, to raise money from every quarter. But Castile's resources were also desperate. Available ships were old and rotting; only a quarter of treasury expenses could be covered; income from America was pledged for several years. Steps were being taken to sell patents of nobility, sell township status to villages, and alienate fiscal rights. ‘God knows how much pain and worry it gives me to see affairs in this state at such a time.’15

  *

  The matter of Philip's second marriage was virtually decided. Charles had suggested that the princess Maria of Portugal (Philip's cousin, as daughter of queen Eleanor's first marriage to the king of Portugal)16 was the most suitable choice, and negotiations were opened. But by 1553 the desperately poor health of the emperor took priority over other business. Charles wished his abdication to take place in his home country of the Netherlands, which he now saw as the centre of his strategy.

  The journey to Brussels could not be postponed long. In the autumn of 1553 Philip received a confidential report from the court:

  In the opinion of his doctors His Majesty cannot expect to live long, because of the great number of illnesses that afflict him, especially in winter and in times of great cold. He puts on a show of being in better health when he is in fact most lacking in health, since the gout attacks him and frequently racks all his limbs and joints and nerves … and the common cold affects him so much that he sometimes appears to be in his last straits, for when he has it he cannot speak nor when he speaks can he be heard … and his piles put him in such agony that he cannot move without great pain and tears. All these things, together with his very great mental sufferings, have completely altered the good humour and affability he used to have, and turned him into a melancholic … And on many occasions he weeps and s
heds tears as copiously as if he were a child.

  Charles refused to see ambassadors, or even his own gentlemen. ‘His Majesty will not allow anyone, lord or prelate, into his presence, nor does he want to deal with papers or sign the few prepared for him. He spends night and day in adjusting and setting his countless clocks, and does little else … And he has spent many days in reading and having read to him the psalms of David.’17

  The proposal to marry Maria of Portugal meanwhile took second place to a far more important possibility. In July 1553 the young Edward VI of England died. The succession to the still largely Catholic country fell to his elder sister Mary. It was a heaven-sent opportunity to create an Anglo-Imperial alliance against France. Charles had himself been briefly betrothed many years before to Mary. He now proposed that she marry Philip. In August 1553, when his ambassador Simon Renard first broached the issue indirectly to Mary, ‘she began to laugh, not once but several times, and looked at me as if to say she found the theme very much to her liking’.18 Once the marriage seemed a possibility, Charles contacted Philip, who immediately put himself at his father's disposal. When Charles made a formal proposal on his son's behalf, Mary's nervous response quickly turned to active interest. She bombarded Renard with searching questions about the prince, and asked for a portrait. On no account would she marry without seeing what her prospective husband looked like, so a copy of Titian's splendid portrait of a handsome Philip in armour (now in the Prado) was sent to her. From the beginning Mary made clear to Charles what she did and did not expect from the marriage. ‘If Philip were disposed to be amorous,’ she told Renard, ‘such was not her desire, for she was the age your Majesty knew of and had never harboured thoughts of love.’ She would love and obey him, ‘but if he wished to encroach in the government of the country, she would be unable to permit it’.19 On 29 October, in her private chapel and attended only by a lady-in-waiting and by Renard, Mary swore to accept Philip as her husband.

  Philip accepted the marriage with Mary as a purely political move. He was not enthusiastic about it, but deferred to his father's wish absolutely. His agreement was given even before he received a portrait of her (now also in the Prado), executed by Antonis Mor. In 1553 he was twenty-six years old, eleven years her junior, and had been unmarried for eight years. In contrast to his reserved attitude to his first wife, during these eight years he had built up a reputation for his adventures with ladies. On his grand tour, in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, he had been a great success with the young women. Mary Tudor pointedly asked Renard about this aspect of the prince. At the very time that the negotiations with her were in progress, Philip in Valladolid was enjoying a relationship with a court lady-in-waiting, Isabel Osorio.20 It was a serious affair that lasted a few years. Philip apparently gave her a secret document declaring that she was his wife. He took care of her (she remained unmarried) and she died, wealthy, in 1590.21 Subsequent to the English wedding, when Philip went to the Netherlands in 1555 he immediately had love affairs with at least two ladies, one of whom apparently bore him a daughter.22 After her marriage to Philip, Mary commented to the Venetian ambassador in England that ‘if she did not have a chaste king, at least he was free from the love of any other woman’.23 She may sincerely have believed this.

  In England there was strong opposition at every level to the marriage, fomented assiduously by the French ambassador Noailles. Though the English and Spaniards had been allies for a long time, the former were reluctant to be dragged into Charles V's wars, and wary of the problems posed by the presence of Protestantism in their country. Most of the royal council disapproved, and on 31 October the House of Commons supplicated the queen not to marry a foreigner. With typical Tudor determination, Mary persisted. On 16 November she called a hurried meeting of the Commons (only about twenty members managed to attend) and announced her decision. The marriage contract, signed on 12 January 1554, attempted to allay English fears. Philip would share responsibilities and titles with Mary, conform to all English laws and customs, admit no foreigners to office in England, and not involve England in the wars of his other realms. If Mary pre-deceased him, he would relinquish his powers. The conditions were very similar to those which rulers of Spain were used to (and which king Ferdinand of Aragon accepted when he married queen Isabella of Castile). There was therefore no problem about accepting them.

  Frustrated by Charles's success in arranging the marriage, Henry II of France plotted with discontented English nobles and sent money through Noailles. In January 1554 the leader of the council, bishop Stephen Gardiner, issued orders for the arrest of the chief plotters. The only part of the scheme to proceed to the stage of a rising was the movement led from Kent by Sir Thomas Wyatt. The rebels marched on London, but Mary stood her ground, and appealed directly to the people in a speech at the Guildhall on 1 February. The rising collapsed and Wyatt surrendered; the whole affair lasted just a week.

  Because leniency towards plotters at the beginning of the reign was seen as a cause of the rebellion in 1554, clemency was put aside. About fifty people, most of humble origin but with some prominent casualties such as the guiltless Lady Jane Grey, suffered the death sentence. Early in March, with England tranquil again, the count of Egmont came over from Brussels to ratify the marriage in the name of the emperor and Philip. Before Egmont and the lords of the council, Mary pledged her vows and placed on her finger the ring sent by Charles. On 2 April parliament approved the marriage.

  English ambassadors had meanwhile gone to Spain to escort Philip to England. Philip in return sent to England the traditional gift of a wedding jewel, taken by the marquis of Las Navas. At Valladolid the preparations for the journey and wedding were on a grand scale. Philip estimated that he would be arriving with a personal retinue of between 3,000 and 5,000 persons, not to mention the 6,000 soldiers and mariners who would escort the ships.24 He apparently thought the proposed retinue was modest, but was later persuaded that it looked more like an invasion force. Arrangements were made to leave as regent in Spain his younger sister Juana, whose husband the prince of Portugal had died on 2 January, three weeks after she had given birth to a son, Sebastian. Aged only nineteen when widowed, Juana was attractive but austere; ‘discreet’ and ‘religious’ were terms applied to her.25 She chose to spend the rest of her life in the service of the crown and of religion and, once she had settled her affairs in Portugal, returned to Valladolid. Philip went to the frontier in May 1554 to meet her.

  The Cortes of Castile assembled in the city under the presidency of princess Juana, who now took over the government. Philip and his entourage left Valladolid on 16 May and travelled north to Santiago, where the English ambassadors were waiting. He signed the marriage contract brought from England by the duke of Bedford. On Sunday, 24 June the prince and the English nobles attended high mass together in Compostela cathedral.

  Philip sailed from Coruña in the afternoon of 13 July. The fleet consisted of seventy large vessels and several lesser ships, bearing the leading lords and ladies of Castile as well as a now reduced force of 4,000 troops. An escort of thirty armed ships brought up the rear. It was an uncomfortable voyage and Philip became violently seasick. ‘I nearly died of seasickness,’ Ruy Gómez reported.26 The ships were met off the Isle of Wight by armed vessels from England, under Lord Howard of Effingham, and from the Netherlands. They entered Southampton in the afternoon of 20 July.

  The Spaniards were greeted by typical English weather – wind and pouring rain that did not stop for several days. Philip thought better about disembarking his whole retinue at once, and went ashore accompanied by only nine nobles, among them Alba and the counts of Egmont and Homes. With the reception party was the Earl of Arundel, who presented Philip on the queen's behalf with membership of the medieval chivalric Order of the Garter. The following day the rest of the fleet disembarked, while the soldiers continued on to Plymouth. The prince rested a couple of days in Southampton, then proceeded to Winchester. He entered the town on the twenty-third with
a numerous escort. He was ‘riding on a faire white horse in a rich coate embroidered with gold, with a white fether in his hat’,27 and was received at the cathedral by the chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, who escorted him to meet Mary. He spoke in Spanish to her, she spoke French. The daughter of a Spaniard, Mary understood Spanish but did not speak it well.28 ‘After they had talked together half an hour they kissed and departed.’

  On the night of Tuesday the twenty-fourth he and Mary were paid a special visit by Charles's personal envoy Juan de Figueroa, regent of Naples.29 Figueroa brought a very special wedding gift: formal investiture as king of Naples and duke of Milan. Charles, in effect, abdicated from these realms and passed them on to his son. The royal pair agreed that the title of king of Naples should be publicly and formally bestowed immediately before the wedding rite in the cathedral the following day. Philip was now in his own right a king, and could marry Mary on equal terms. From this week, he signed his letters as ‘king-prince’, el rey príncipe. In a typical display of independence, he refused to allow any mention of Milan. That, he said, ‘was an old matter’, and his father had granted him the succession in 1540.30

  The wedding took place, with appropriate splendour, in Winchester cathedral on 25 July, feast-day of St James, patron saint of Spain.31 From the beginning, and mindful of his father's urgent advice, Philip tried his best to make a good impression on the English. He instructed his retinue to ‘adapt and adjust to their customs, which we all have to accept as our own’.32 Though all too aware of the recent uprising and the general lack of security in England, he cut down on the size of his Spanish escort and took some English nobles into his retinue. He attempted some words in English. When taking leave of Mary at their first meeting, the hour was late so she taught him how to say ‘Good-night’ to her ladies, but he forgot it in a second and came back to ask her again.33 He went walking among the people, despite the rain, and played gallant to the ladies. He drank the tepid beer of the English, so as not to offend. The item appears regularly in the accounts of his kitchen.34 ‘He has shown,’ an ambassador commented, ‘such great sweetness of temper and such affability as not to be surpassed.’35